


Azazel

by starkraving



Series: A Slight Variation [5]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alec does not know, Alec is highkey worried, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, BAMF Magnus Bane, Hurt Magnus Bane, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Magnus is the one who usually has his shit together, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Alec Lightwood, What To Do, is kind of losing his shit, when his immortal boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 07:40:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14492097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Magnus fights a greater demon one-on-one. He wins, but he’s not alright. What do all-powerful warlocks do when they’re hurt? Light things on fire apparently. Alec is concerned. Episode-style fic about demon lore, warlock culture, and surviving shitty circumstances.





	Azazel

**Author's Note:**

> Yo. Warning for an non-con content in this story. Actual assault is off screen, but the fight and lead up is on-screen. Stay safe y'all.

“It’s not my fault he isn’t as good at doing the job as I am,” Magnus says, his phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder. His arms are occupied by a very old ming vase and a slightly haunted boombox from a thrift shop in Queens. He kicks the door to his apartment shut behind him. “Yes. He is insufferable. He’s also your problem now and, honestly, I do not envy you the bi-weekly torture.” Magnus puts the vase down and frowns at the boombox, arching a brow. “Well that’s your fault for claiming to ‘dabble’ in ceramics. If Lorenzo is bringing you collectable kitten figurines or whatever, you’ve brought it on yourself.”

There’s a sizable volume spike from the other end of the line and Magnus grins, clasping a hand to his chest despite being the only one in the room to appreciate his own theatrics.

“Alexander, I would _never_ take delight in your torment. That would be cruel.”

Sarcasm from the other end of the line.

“Well, yes, I suppose.”

Less sarcasm from the other end.

“Only if you ask nicely and swear to never speak to me about ceramics.”

He puts the boombox down, jams his thumb against the ‘play’ button and an otherworldly sound warbles from the speakers. He hits the ‘pause’ button and shoves the box into a wooden chest by the coat rack. Then he kicks the chest and it generates a cough of magic before sealing.

“Hmm? Oh, nothing. A curiosity. Potentially an exorcism.”

Laughter. A question.

“Tomorrow? Yes, my afternoon is open.” He grins. “Okay. I’ll see you then.”

He hangs up the phone and turns toward the kitchen… and runs directly into the person standing behind him. Magnus who, reasonably, was not expecting there to being anything much less a person in a tailored suit behind him, immediately lunges backward, slamming into the wall. His phone hits the floor and the thing (not a person) in his foyer lunges at him. Time stops. It doesn’t, but it does. In the agonizing split of a split second between one heartbeat and the next, his attacker does exactly what you need to do in close quarters with a warlock.

It body checks him into the wall and pins him by the wrists.

He feels it like a severing of tendon in his arms – his magic chained by a crushing dark and then fully immobilized by the physical restraint on his hands. He reacts on instinct.

_“Incant domis rei –!”_

“Oh, none of that,” says the demon.

And then it crushes its mouth against his.

Magnus wrenches his head, but the thing stifles his spell before he can finish. And all at once he can’t breathe. He thrashes but the demon holding him is like warm brick, like steel. It’s not kissing him so much as using its jaw to pin his skull against the wall behind him, sealing his mouth so he can’t verbalize an enchantment. He can hear the dry wall cracking behind him. Feel the ten-ton weight of the being caging him to the wall, how fucking enormous it really is, how it’s the size of mountain in his mind and how it’s crushing him alive –!

And then it stops.

It jerks back and Magnus coughs sulfurous air, gasping raggedly, and the demon snaps close again. So close he can feel the inferno in the back of its throat when it breathes on him. He tries instinctively to cast, but the monster has his wrists trapped. It’s breathing in his face like a kiln.

“If you try speak spellwork again, little thing, I will do more than stop your tongue.”

Magnus keeps his gaze straight forward, his expression closed. He doesn’t try again.

“Good. You recognize me?”

He nods once, stiffly.

“Then greet me, warlock.”

Magnus glances toward the closed door, then back at the demon.

“Azazel.” The syllables crackle in his mouth like static, stripping the saliva off his tongue. He grimaces but keeps his tone level through sheer force of ancient will. “You have terrible timing. I’ve already crafted a ward against your name, so your effort and the effort of your sender is _greatly_ wasted.”

The demon who looks almost like a perfectly regular man, smiles.

“Yes, I see that.” He leans near again, so close Magnus can see the infinity of the void in his gaze. “Impressive, son of Asmodeus. But you’re too specific in your protections.” He leans near, presses his body against Magnus, chest to chest, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip and starts to press, press, press forward until Magnus’ ribs start to strain. Like he’s being crushed between two walls. Azazel’s lips are hot against his ear. “I cannot draw your blood, warlock, but there is so much _harm_ I can still enact.”

Magnus struggles to speak. Struggles to breathe… then there’s flare and the demon is driven back half a step, shoved by terrible force and Magnus gains a momentarily respite, coughing, lungs burning. But Azazel it’s on him again immediately, pinning him back to the wall.

“Oh, it _is_ a clever construction, isn’t it?”

Magnus snarls. He wrenches – with muscle, with magic, with everything he has but he’s already in the snare. He can feel the demon running invisible fingers through his spellwork, feeling out the shape of his protective ward, like a thousand, thousand hands exploring the lines of a web rooted in his chest. The vibrato of its exploration shivers torturous down his bones. It feels like the demon has his hands inside his chest cavity, like there are nails scraping the inside of his ribs and it takes everything not to scream.

Azazel is looking for a hole in the weave, a way to get in, to maul him directly. Viscerally. In blood and bone and red.

The demon leans in, laughing, “A net to hold the sea at bay.”

“Yes,” Magnus says, far more confidently than he feels with a dark sun’s worth of demonic power bearing against his wards. “Draw my blood in any fashion, in bruise or wound or any divergence of function in me, and you’re going straight back to hell.”

Azazel laughs and his voice is like a fist around his lungs.

“A challenge then?” Azazel bristles and glows with delight. “Intriguing! A puzzle! What harm can I inflict then to avoid your snare?” The demon yanks Magnus forward, hands still clasped around his forearms, dragging him into the foyer with all the effort of dragging a child. “I can hold you here, warlock.” He jerks Magnus hard, to the right, forcing him to catch his balance. “I can make you a puppet.” He yanks Magnus forward, his arms pressed to the demon’s chest. Azazel breathes heat against his face. “I can make you _suffer_ without ever drawing blood.”

“If you have the time, I have no doubt,” Magnus says, magic crackling in his skin, banked behind his teeth. The demon grins, but his fingers blacken around Magnus’ wrists. “But your time and influence in this dimension is limited and I’m not _helpless_.”

“Then the terms are set.” Azazel bares his teeth and they are both human and needle-fanged, iron and bone. “If I break your will before that time, then I’ll carve your beating heart from your chest.”

And before he can react to this, Azazel shoves forward, still gripping his wrists and forces Magnus backward, backward toward…

Magnus feels his heart stop.

Azazel _smiles_.

The walls of the apartment groan and tremble, cracks splitting down the brick, knocking paintings from frames as the air in his loft gets thin, gets hot, and begins to taste of metal. The rooms scream with passive ward work, ripping themselves from the walls of the warlock’s home to assault the thing that is pushing their master down the hall… but Azazel shrugs them off. A thousand wards crumpling like paper airplanes against him.

He _smiles_.

He shoves Magnus backward into his own bedroom.

Magnus forgets which language he’s speaking in when he snarls, “ _No_!”

He wrenches his arms in the demon’s grip, but it’s like pulling against padded iron. His boots skid against the hardwood. Magnus shoves back. Fire ignites in his fingertips, ice in his veins, magic racing under his skin like lightning through the wirework of his insides. The room is engulfed in napalm-blue flame. The air is screaming… but the demon grabs his hands and _he kisses them_.

Magnus feels the curse snap though his palms like a nail driven through bone, ripping the magic out of him at the root. The flames go out and screams at the agony of it. He falls, falls and he –

He’s lying on his back now, on his own bed. It’s unmade and still smells like its right occupants. Like his own skin and the cologne Alec bought in Berlin.

Azazel is laughing and his voice is a sonic-boom in Magnus’ skull, debilitating and deafening. So loud he can’t hear himself think. He screams just to hear his own voice in the maelstrom, to penetrate the noise. Magnus can’t move. He can’t move. There’s an impossible weight drilling every limb into the mattress beneath him, like his body weighs a thousand pounds, like he’s trapped on the planet Jupiter and being crushed by gravitational forces beyond this world. His arms are lying over his head, but they might as well be lead. His skull is an anvil. His spine is an anchor chain. He can’t _move_.

And even as he’s being held, immobilized, and gasping… he can feel Azazel pulling the front of his shirt open. He can barely breathe. He can barely speak. His entire soul burning. Azazel is sliding human hands down his bare chest, mapping his ribs with warm fingers from his collarbone to his belly and – _Do not scream._ – Magnus gathers every molecule of will power in his fucking being and… forces himself to roll onto his side, to try to… to crawl away. Oh god…

“I’m impressed,” Azazel says, his mouth against the back of his neck. “Very few could muster the strength for resistance…”

Magnus doesn’t answer. He can’t answer. He’s breathing fast, ragged. His heart is in his fucking throat. Azazel grabs the back of his belt and yanks him back toward the foot of the bed and Magnus bites back the instinct to scream for help that will not come.

“Do you know, your father loves you?”

Magnus can’t move, but he can move his eyes. He glances back at the demon, hovering over him, smiling and he can feel that his mark is bare. That his eyes are gold and draconic in the familiar light of his bedroom. The monster on top of him has a thousand teeth behind his human façade.

“You are part of him. And as demons are all devoted to themselves, so he is devoted to you, so he finds you beautiful and wants for your power to subsume the _world_.” Azazel’s teeth are against his neck, the shell of his ear. His hands are pulling Magnus’ shirt apart like tissue paper. His fingers are counting every vertebra in his spine going down. “For that reason,” says the demon, “I find your torment satisfying.”

“ _You can’t hurt me_ ,” Magnus manages, through his teeth, through his aching lungs.

He says it in a long dead language, but Azazel understands.

“I won’t hurt you, Magnus Bane.” Azazel has one fist in his hair, pinning him so the beast can breathe against his skull. “Your own spell protects you from that so _well done_.” His laugh slides under skin. “But I can give you other things, warlock, until you break your spell. And when you do, I swear to you, I will cut your throat with the finest blade.” His mouth presses against Magnus’ neck and for a horrifying instant, the demon speaks with Alec Lightwood’s voice. “You will feel _nothing_ in your dying.”

“I won’t let you kill me.”

“Won’t you? Haven’t you wanted to die before? Haven’t you felt the comfort of oblivion?”

Magnus clenches his eyes shut. He closes his fists, his nails biting into his own palms, but the blood drawn does not dispel the beast.

“Good. I find parts of you beautiful as well. I will show you how.”

Magnus gives up then on not screaming.

 

* * *

 

Raphael gets a phone call at 1AM. He pauses on the steps of the DuMort, checks the caller ID, and waves both of his lieutenants to go ahead of him. He does not miss the way they glance knowingly at each other as they go. They think it’s Izzy on the phone of course. He’d be annoyed, but as far as clan gossip goes, the benign details of his relationships are much preferred drama to _actual_ vampire drama He accepts the call, placing the phone near his ear.

“Magnus,” he says. He allows a smile in his tone. “It’s a bit late even for you.”

“Raphael.”

He stops walking.

“What is it?” A beat and Raphael paces. “Magnus, what is it?” Still no answer, just the sound of breathing, unsteady and ragged. “ _Magnus_?”

It takes him two minutes to cross town at full speed and when he comes through the door, it’s unwarded, but locked. He busts it off its hinges as he comes through, tosses the door aside like kindling. The foyer is destroyed, the walls of the apartment gutted in chunks – the telltale sign of violently activated protection charms. He follows the smell of blood down a side corridor that he knows leads to the warlock’s personal quarters and… he stops. On the threshold of his mentor’s bedroom, he stops. The door is cracked open. There is light coming through the gap.

“Magnus?” He pushes the door open.

There is blood on the floor. Magnus is sitting on the floor with his back against the foot of his bed, his arms draped over his knees. He’s wearing sweats and a hoodie and that in and of itself arrests the vampire. He stops. He studies the room: the stripped bed, the bloody handprint on the hardwood, the smell of metal. Magnus looks up at him. His eyes are gold and his palm gashed open. He looks disheveled. Blood drips sluggish from his fingers and Raphael is not usually struck by the fact of Magnus’ immortality, but in that one initial look… he seems terrifyingly young for his centuries,

“I’m sorry,” he says very casually. “I shouldn’t have called you.”

Raphael blinks.

“I should have called Caterina,” he goes on. “Silly of me.”

“Why are you bleeding, Magnus?”

“Oh.” He stares at his hand. “Well, it’s much stronger magic to use blood for renewed wards.”

“Are you okay?”

“Well, I’m not dead,” he says thoughtfully.

“Magnus. Do not be cryptic right now.”

“I had a fight with a greater demon.” Magnus says this very matter of factly. “Azazel, in fact. Fought him for… well, the last five hours or so. I think? It’s hard to tell. I’m having trouble standing up just now. Can you do me a favor?”

“Anything,” Raphael says quietly.

“I need you to…” Magnus stops and for a horrible second his expression collapses suddenly into a painful twist. He breathes raggedly, deeply, then calms down. He looks up at Raphael again. “I need you to get my first aid kit and a bottle of vodka. I just – oh. Thank you.”

Raph is already handing both to him, having fetched them between one word and the next. “What else?”

Magnus dumps the vodka over his bleeding hand, then drinks a long pull directly from the bottle. Raph take this opportunity to start bandaging the warlock’s palm, ignoring the blood and everything his instincts tell him to do about the blood, because the blood belongs to Magnus and even his deepest driving instincts can’t get past that fact. The core of him, that can never look at Magnus that way.

“Can you sit with me a moment?”

“Of course.”

“I’m just trying to get my head straight.”

“You fought a demon? _Here_?”

Magnus nods and takes another pull from the vodka bottle.

“Are you injured?”

Magnus keeps drinking from the vodka bottle.

“Uh?” There’s a long pause before the warlock stops drinking. A significant portion of the vodka is gone. “Why haven’t you called Lightwood?”

Magnus says nothing, just wipes his mouth with the back of one hand.

Raphael, hesitant, reaches a hand out and lays it against Magnus’ shoulder. “Hey.”

And rather without warning Magnus chokes, jerks forward, and immediately pukes vodka on the floor. Raphael, who has never seen Magnus not hold his liquor in any circumstance, feels a crawl of real fear, feels a sudden loom of dread. Like the perspective in the room has shifted slightly and revealed some grinning horror just in the corner of his eye. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Magnus says, but in ragged, breathless Spanish.

 _“What do you need?”_ Raphael repeats, following his lead.

 _“I don’t know,”_ Magnus admits through his teeth. His hand is a fist against his midriff. His hair is sticking to his forehead in dark patches. He wipes his mouth with his wrist and sits up, shaking his head. _“I don’t know, dear boy. I’m sorry.”_

 _“Do you need me…”_ Raphael stops, registers the fact Magnus’ hands are shaking. Badly. The tremor is sliding up his arms. He keeps his tone level. _“I hate to say this, but you need to go to the Clave. A greater demon attack is Institute business, Magnus. Do you agree?”_

 _“Yes. You’re right. Of course.”_ Magnus shakes his head, switches back to English. “I just need to get myself together. Then I’ll call the Clave.” His hand around the neck of the bottle tenses. “I just need a minute.”

“Whatever you need.”

“I don’t know why I called you. I didn’t want you to see this.”

“You called me because you were just in a fight and I know how to watch your back. Just like the Harlem purge. Just like any other fight.” Raphael lets show some fang, gripping the warlock’s shoulder tight. “I’m glad you called me. You can always call on me.”

Magnus looks at him, “Thank you, Raphael.”

“C’mon. You can stand.” Raphael takes his forearm and pulls Magnus up. The warlock towers over him once he’s on his feet, but he seems… smaller than he usually does. It makes Raphael nervous, so he says, cooly, “Magnus, your mark.”

He blinks. His eyes are brown again. “Thank you.”

“What do you need?” Raphael asks again. “Your magic is shot, right? Need something to eat? Because I can get gyros from 5thand Hale. Just say so.”

Magnus laughs and it’s a balm to the vampire’s nerves. “I appreciate it, but can you stay with me?”

“Of course.”

 “I just need a minute,” Magnus says again.

His hands are still shaking. Raphael can feel his pulse, rabbit-fast in his wrists. He ignores it.

“Take your time.”

 

* * *

 

Alec gets the call at 2AM that Magnus is at the Institute with Raphael Santiago and they’re there to file a report. Magnus’ presence at the Institute in general has become commonplace enough that it doesn’t stir quite as much ruckus as it used to. But when one of the strongest Warlocks in the state shows up unannounced and on Clave business, it still gets people talking.

He’s in an interview room with Isabelle by the time Alec gets dressed and comes down, hair still mussed from sleep, one boot half tied. There is, he is surprised to find, a small crowd gathered on the other side of the one-way glass. He feels the anxiety in the place immediately. Jace is there, one elbow braced against the wall, leaning his weight there, his pale stare intent on the conversation beyond the glass. He can feel his brother’s restlessness like a shifting animal in his head.

“What’s happened?” Alec asks, level as a beam externally.

Jace doesn’t say anything.

One of the night-shift guys glances at him, then answers carefully. “Greater demon attack. Bane is saying he fought the demon Azazel tonight.”

Alec feels a crawl of dread in the room.

He feels it himself, sliding along the interior of his ribcage and encroaching on the sudden knotted locus somewhere between his heart and his lungs. Magnus is sitting at an interview table facing the glass. Isabelle’s given him a paper cup full of tea and Magnus is rotating an idle finger in circular movements above it, a little red straw swiveling on a telekinetic string. Round and around in the cup. His wearing a black wool overcoat. His hair’s done up in a kind of almost-Mohawk. Alec can tell, but not explain how, that Magnus’ eyeliner is a little more aggressive than usual.

“How many casualties?”

“None,” says Jace. “Magnus banished the motherfucker.”

“Solo,” says someone else.

Murmurs.

Someone says, softly, “Why the _fuck_ isn’t he High Warlock again?”

Alec waves a hand and the voices still. “Some of you shouldn’t be here. I’ll brief everyone if it’s necessary. Until then, clear it out. First alert team, do CCTV sweeps and start looking for demonic precursors. Now. Do your jobs.”

The room empties until only Jace remains.

Alec keeps his voice low. “Where’s Clary?”

“Talking to Santiago,” he says, gaze never moving from the glass. “Magnus came in with him. He showed up after the fight apparently. Saw the aftermath. He’s got his clan on high alert and working with the wolves to coordinate on any demonic activity. Luke’s watching mundane police chatter. So far, nothing.”

“What aftermath?”

“The demon attacked him in his apartment, Alec.”

“ _What_?”

“Do not,” Jace enunciates, “freak out. Magnus very specifically came down here to file a report not with you because he wanted this by the book. Let’s just get this done, then you guys can talk. Okay? Just listen. I’ll bet he knows you’re here.” Jace jerks a chin toward the glass. “See?”

Magnus is peering at the one-way mirror.

He winks.

Alec feels a surge of irritation and affection in equal parts.

“He’s chipper for a guy who fist-fought a demon,” says Jace.

“Not helping.”

“Sorry.”

Inside the interview room, Isabelle is taking a seat, setting a glass of water on the table. “Are you good to keep going?” She is maintaining her professionalism but only just. “Do you need anything else?”

Magnus smiles. “Thank you, my dear, but I’m fine.”

“So… you think someone summoned Azazel to attack you?”

“Yes.” Magnus sits back in his seat, holding his hands on the table. “Since he was last banished, I’ve kept tabs of a sort on him and my understanding is that he’s still very much trapped in his realm. The only way he could get to this side is with the aid of a summoning. Furthermore, it’s hard to explain, but I could feel the spell tethering him to our dimension. I felt it dissolve when the parameters of his contract were not met. I do not believe he’s… _loose_ , so to speak.”

“Do you have any idea who might do such a thing?”

“Well,” says Magnus, dragging the last consonant out for a while. “Lots of people would love to set greater demons loose in my kitchen or whatever, but very few of them have the power for it.” He sips his tea. “Fewer than that are aware of Azazel having any connection to me at all. Tenuous as it is. To tempt Azazel into accepting such a compact, they must have known about our history.”

“Did Azazel share any info that might help us find the summoner?”

“No,” Magnus says regretfully. “Granted, I was distracted with holding him off and he mostly threatened to murder me in the most creative ways possible. The usual.”

Alec tilts his head.

“What?” Jace says.

“Nothing.”

Isabelle goes on. “So nothing about who may or may not have summoned him?”

“No,” Magnus says.

“Magnus… you faced Azazel once before and it went very badly. What is different this time?”

“I’ve been devising a warding spell for use against specifically named demons. I had a… prototype of sorts already active as part of my personal defense set. Azazel was prevented from doing me physical harm, but not from destroying my apartment and trying to claw his way through my wards. I had to hold him off for some time.”

“So you held off a greater demon.”

“Yes.”

There is a long silence both in the interrogation room and the observation room.

Magnus clears his throat. “It’s not the first spell of its kind, Isabelle. It’s been done before. This version is simply more passive.”

“Will you be sharing the design?”

“Yes. Cat and some of my other colleagues are already aware of my work. I’ll be sending the details immediately to Lorenzo Rey should he feel it necessary to arm the community. I…” He hesitates. His fingers tense a little on the rim of the paper cup. He clears his throat. “I never hoped to have occasion to test-run this spell, honestly. It was all theoretical.” He manages a smile, but its brittle. “But now I have proof of concept.”

“Magnus,” Isabelle says, quietly though.

“Yes?”

“Are you _okay_?”

Magnus glances down at himself. “Yes? Do I not seem okay?”

“No. You don’t have a scratch on you. You fought a greater demon… and there’s not a scratch on you.”

There’s a beat of silence there.

Magnus taps a finger on the table. “I know. I wish I could say it’s because my spellwork is so proficient, but to be honest, I think Azazel was… he was enjoying himself. So, he didn’t try as hard to kill me.” Magnus’ fingers stop moving for a moment. “If he wanted me dead, I think I would be, but he was there on a whim.”

Isabelle’s hands curl into fists, but her voice is gentle. “A whim?”

“A greater demon accepting a common contract on a warlock?” says Magnus. He tilts head at Isabelle. “He thought it would be _funny_. I’m not sure there’s much more to it.”

Jace, in the observation room, glances at Alec. Alec pretends not to notice as he pretends that every line of muscle in his body isn’t winding tight across his bones. That Magnus was very much almost dead for a lark. He can feel Jace, again, on the edge of his thoughts transmitting a vague feeling that Alec chooses to translate as, _Calm the fuck down_.

“I’m very glad you’re okay,” Isabelle says.

Magnus smiles.

“Likewise. My primary concern is that there is a warlock out there summoning greater demons. The princes of hell are dangerous enough in their own realm. If Azazel had been struck by a different mood, he may have broken from his contract and run loose rather than pursue me. I worry the next time, we will not be so lucky.”

Izzy stands to her feet, picking up her tablet and ending the session. “Thank you for bringing this to us.”

“Of course.”

She then immediately comes around the table and grabs the warlock in a bear hug.

“Oof! Oh. Hello!”

“What the fuck?” whispers Izzy, squeezing her friend tightly. “Don’t fight demons in your PJs. That’s a terrible idea.”

Magnus laughs. “Agreed. And I didn’t. Now, I think your brother is –” And here Alec comes into the room. “—yes. I thought so. Hi.”

Alec closes the gap between them and his bear hug is sizably more effective against the shorter warlock, who immediately turns his face against his neck and inhales like he’s been holding his breath. Alec can feel a tension in the other man’s body and how it unwinds under the pressure he exerts, so he holds on for longer than he originally intended. He slides one hand up along the back of Magnus’ neck, into the short part of his hair at the back of his head. Magnus smells like metal, like magic, like that sandalwood stuff he uses in the shower.

“I’m okay,” he says, voice muffled somewhere against Alec’s collarbone.

“Sure,” Alec says, not letting go.

“Really. I’m very hard to kill.”

Izzy discretely shuts the door on her way out and Alec turns his face, pressing his nose into Magnus’ hair.

“I know. I’m doing that thing where I imagine how different this night might have gone. So just… give me a second.” He feels Magnus shifting his weight, his body heat through his jacket. Evidence that this reality (not the alternative one he’s imagining) is real. “Why the hell do you have to be so dangerous?”

“I’m old,” Magnus says, deadpan. “I’m old and I’m kind of aggravating. Enemies are inevitable.”

Alec leans back just enough so he can duck down, gather Magnus’ head in his hands, and press his brow against his. Feels Magnus breathe against his lips and only when he feels him angle his head a little does Alec immediately close the space between them and kiss him. He tastes a little metallic. He always tastes metallic when he’s been deep in magic use. Alec breaks away, his fingers sliding into the lapels of Magnus’ coat and gripping there. The warlock is looking up at him, gaze unreadable and dark.

“I’m gonna find whoever did this,” Alec says quietly.

“I have no doubt,” Magnus says.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Azazel…”

Magnus shakes his head. “I’ll be fine. I’m in no rush to do it again, mind you. But I’m fine.”

Alec leans down, kisses him again. When he does it, he feels a hitch in his breath that makes Alec twitch back slightly. Far enough to see Magnus’ face which, all at once, is rigid with anxiety not previously there. Or rather, not previously visible.  

“Magnus?” Alec leans back to look him in the eyes. “What is it?”

Magnus hesitates and there’s a river of something running behind his eyes, a rushing, like he’s thinking fast about what he’s going to say. Alec has seen it enough to recognize it. Has seen it rarely enough to recognize something is, actually, very wrong and he instinctively moves his hands back to Magnus’ face, slipping his thumbs behind the hinge of his jaw.

“Hey,” he says softly, lifting his partner’s gaze. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

Magnus shakes his head. “Ask me again later.” And when Alec hesitates, he says, “I’ll tell you. I’m just processing a few things. Alright?”

Alec resists his urge to insist. “Okay. Okay.” He slides the pad of his right thumb across the side of Magnus’ cheek, scouring his face for some… signal or non-verbal invite, but there is no give in his partner’s gaze. “Just… let me know what I can do. You need somewhere to rest for a second? You can use my personal quarters until we need you, if you want?”

“Thank you, Alexander I… might take you up on that.”

“Okay. Take it easy and head that way for now. I’ll get you when we need you again. Okay?”

“Okay. Now go run this place.

“I love you.”

“Likewise. Now _go_.”

 

* * *

 

Later, Jace catches Alec as he enters the war room. “You good?”

“Why wouldn’t I be good?” Alec demands, moving to the central deployment console.

“Because Azazel tried to maul your boyfriend.” Jace takes a place across from him, hands braced on the tabletop. “I think it’s reasonable that you might not be good.”

Alec shoots him a look just left of murderous. “Magnus is fine. So, I’m fine. I’ll be better when we catch the idiot baiting greater demons.”

“Stop bickering,” says Isabelle, dropping her tablet onto the console and syncing them. A 3-D render pops up from the blue and white grid. “We have our shortlist of warlocks strong enough to even try something like this. Onsight team’s found the summoning circle.” Photos pop up over the console. “Someone killed the downstairs neighbors directly under Magnus’ apartment, used their kitchen ceiling to put the circle directly under his living room. They knew what they were doing, since none of Magnus’ perimeter charms caught wind.”

“God, they killed the Holtmans?” Alec says.

Izzy looks stricken. “You knew them?”

“Not exactly, But, like, in passing. Magnus owns the building. The Holtmans were his property managers. Does he know?”

Izzy looks anxious. “Alec, are you sure you should be working this case?”

“Don’t. If we do that, then none of us could work this.” Alec keeps his expression and tone completely neutral in a way he knows the others won’t buy, but he maintains it anyway. “If there’s a greater demon involved, then it’s all hands on deck. Period. Where’s Clary?”

“Here!” Clary Fray arrives at a sprint, whacking into the edge of the table in her eagerness. “Ow. I’ve got lead. Raphael’s clan came back with something. Apparently, there was chatter in a Jersey bleeder-den that someone took a hit out against Magnus. Raph’s got one of his lieutenants on site; they’re holding witnesses for questioning.”

“That was fast,” Jace mutters.

“Raphael would rather rip his hair out than admit it, but Magnus means a lot to him,” Isabelle says. “And don’t tell him I told you that, by the way. The point is, his clan could be a problem. Magnus has protected their group a lot over the decades. Even if Raph told them to cooperate with the Clave, they’ll be out for blood.” A beat. “You know, more than usual.”

“Then there’s no time to waste.” Clary smacks the table. “Let’s go.”

She starts to dart away but Jace snags her arm and stops her short. “Whoa. Slow it down, Fray. Game plan. We’re all close to this one so let’s be levelheaded about this.”

He’s looking at Alec as he says this.

Alec continues to maintain his neutrality. “Agreed. Clary, take Raphael and Izzy with you and grab Marset and Tank for back up. Jace and I will meet up with the on-site team after we dial up Lorenzo and get the word out about the attack. Magnus is going to have to put some kind of documentation together on his anti-demon spell, so we need to make sure that’s distributed. Keep us posted on what you find at the den.”

Nods around the table from gathered Shadowhunters.

Alec raises his voice. “This matter is first priority. The last time Azazel walked this realm, he killed over a dozen people, mundane and Shadowhunter alike. We got lucky this time. We might not again. Jarek. Marks. You’re leading city sweeps; full battery demonic scans. Jetty. Xiao. Get on the phones with our other warlock contacts, start warning them and asking for information.”

“Are the warlocks really going to turn over one of their own?” Jetty asks, just a little skeptical.

“They will if you say the attack was on Magnus Bane.”

“They voted him out as High Warlock. Are you sure?”

Alec gives Jetty a look. “High Warlock or not, immortals have long memories. They’ll cooperate. Just get started.”

A nod and the teams disperse.

Jace follows Alec out of the room toward the elevators, matching his pace with a purposeful kind of posture that Alec recognizes as his brother steeling himself for a tough conversation. “Magnus fought off a greater demon,” he says.

Alec already hates this conversation. “Yes. Your point?”

“He fought off a greater demon and he’s completely uninjured.”

“That’s probably not true. But make your point.”

Jace pushes on. “Lorenzo Rey is gonna say Magnus had something to do with it.”

“I’m painfully aware what that ceramic-loving fuck is going to say, but we can’t sit on this just because the new High Warlock has political reasons to hate my boyfriend.”

“We could...”

“No, Jace. We really couldn’t.”

“Fine, I get it, but after that ley-line thing we already have another demon sniffing around? That does not look good for Magnus.”

“I know.”

Jace sighs as they get in the elevator. “But you two don’t care. You’re just going to do the right thing even if make your eyes bleed.”

“Yup,” Alec says, but a just a touch through his teeth, hitting the floor button with more force than necessary. “Because it’s what Magnus wants, clearly, and there’s no taking it back now that he’s filed the report.” He stands up straight, hands behind his back. “Cat’s out of the bag.”

“Oh.” Jace points. “You’re mad at him.”

“Of course, I’m not mad at him.”

“You’re a little mad at him.”

Alec exhales noisily. “Fine. I’m a little peeved that, yes, he’s put himself right in the line of fire and he’s about to get raked over the coals for being a victim of an attack. _Again_. But he also kicked a demon in the face and he’s being insufferably noble. So I can only criticize him so much. If he thinks it’s the right move, he’s been around longer so I figure he knows what he’s doing.”

“Or he’s shaken up from a fight and he’s just doing what comes by instinct,” Jace mutters. “Meaning protect others at all costs.”

“I’m aware that’s a possibility.”

Jace eyes him sidelong. “You don’t have to fake being calm with me you know.”

“Appreciated, but it’s not for your benefit,” Alec says, exiting the elevator. “I’m keeping a lid on it because I’ll put my fist through a wall otherwise. So, you know, keep that in mind while we’re talking.”

“Noted.”

When they reach the door to Alec’s room, Jace stops him.

“Hey. Magnus is a badass. All this will blow over. It’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Alec says and knocks. “Magnus? It’s me.”

No answer.

He frowns and opens the door, peering inside. The room is dim and quiet. He indicates Jace should wait in the hall and enters quietly, moving toward the bed where, yes, Magnus is lying face down, one arm tucked under his head, eyes closed, breathing quietly. Alec pauses by the bedside, studying the rise and fall of Magnus’ shoulders, the fact he laid down fully clothed (expensive jacket, boots, and all) and gone straight to sleep.

He reaches out a hand, hesitating momentarily, palm hovering just inches above his boyfriend’s shoulder, near enough to feel the heat of him through his clothes. He’s arrested by this: how Magnus has his face half buried in his arm and that he’s in Alec’s bed and, frankly, it’s not remotely the time to be thinking about that. About the smooth gold curve of his cheekbone or the place where his jaw meets his neck and sense memory that knows exactly what it feels like to fit his hand there.

Alec lays a hand gently on the warlock’s upper back instead, just below the nape of his neck. 

“Magnus. Hey. I need to talk to –”

He gets no farther because the next thing he knows is a sharp crack of pain in the back of his skull and then immediately in his tailbone as he hits the floor. For a stunned moment, he just sits seated, fetched up against the wall. His ribs throb like he got hit by a linebacker. He can feel blood in his hair, sliding down his neck. It takes him a moment longer to realize what happened, to feel the tell-tale static of magic on his skin.

“ _Alexander_!”

“I’m fine,” he says automatically. “It’s okay.”

Jace is in the room, is kneeling beside him, gripping his shoulder so he can get a look at his head. Magnus is on his knees in front of him, horrified. His eyes are gold, fading gold into a terrified brown.

“I’m fine,” Alec says, grabbing Magnus’ hand. “You were asleep. You didn’t mean to.”

“That’s not an excuse,” Magnus says, trying to pull away.

Alec hangs onto him. “Don’t. Don’t do that.”

“Hey, he’s right,” Jace says, immediately. “Magnus, it’s fine. Little healing rune and we’re good as new.”

Alec catches both of Magnus’ hands, gripping tightly. “I’m fine. Magnus, look at me. I’m fine. It’s okay.”

“You’re _bleeding_.”

“I’ve had worse sparring with Clary. Consider it a love tap. You’re fine. Seriously. I kind of can’t deal with you blaming yourself right now. So don’t.”

Magnus snorts. “Oh, you can deal with being thrown into walls, but not with my pointing out I did it?”

“Exactly.”

“You have a concussion.”

Jace finishes up using his stele to activate the healing rune on Alec’s arm. “Not anymore.”

Alec hooks a hand around the back of Magnus’ neck, tugs his forehead against his. “It’s fine. We’re fine.” He can feel the tremor now in Magnus’ frame, suppressed before and obvious now. “It’s okay.”

“God. I’m _sorry_.”

“It’s okay.”

Alec quickly pulls the other man into his arms, gathering his head against his shoulder and holding him there. He ignores the momentary resistance, cursory and unconvincing, to pull away before Magnus collapses against him. His fingers are digging into his collarbone, every line of muscle under Alec’s hands a shivering coil of tension. Magnus is gripping his shirt now. His breathing is ragged, uneven, completely alien against the usual unflappable calm of an immortal.  

Jace meets Alec’s eyes over the top of Magnus’ head and quietly backs away, shutting the door behind him. Magnus is shaking so hard Alec can hear his teeth chatter, feel his body tensing and untensing. He’s breathing too fast.

“He couldn’t kill me.” Magnus speaks through his teeth. “He couldn’t kill me so he… did everything he could to torture – _fuck_.” He shudders, in anger, in horror. “ _Fuck_ , I should be stronger than this. I should _know_ this.”

“It’s okay.” Alec runs his hand through Magnus’ hair, ignores the texture of too much pomade and gel, hushing softly, with more calm than he actually possesses. He keeps it together and promises, “You’re just… it’s just shock. You’re still on edge. It’s totally normal and it’s okay. You’re here. You’re with me.”

Magnus shakes his head, pressing his face into Alec’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I thought… I forgot how this felt. I thought I could walk it off. I didn’t mean to do this here. I’m sorry.”

Alec can feel his own eyes stinging. “You never have to walk anything off,” he whispers.

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying that. You have nothing to be sorry about. Absolutely nothing. Nothing matters except that you’re here, okay? I literally do not give a shit about anything else. You’re here. Do you understand?”

“Thank you, Alexander.”

“Just breathe. Okay?”

He takes a shuddering breath. “Okay.” Alec can hear him trying to smile. “Jeez. So much for centuries of warfare. It’s like I’ve never lost a fight before…”

“You didn’t lose.”

Magnus huffs. “Right.”

Alec pulls him tighter, ducks his face against the warlock’s hair. He can feel his pulse racing still beneath his skin, the fever heat of fear off the back of his neck, shivering in his teeth. Alec keeps his palm tucked against the back of Magnus’ head. He holds on until Magnus is still again in his grip, the maelstrom quieted to a low-grade hum and in the silence that comes, he keeps replaying the words in his head: _I forgot how this felt. I forgot how this felt. I forgot how this felt._

 

* * *

 

Jace meets him at the elevator. Alec gets in the elevator, waits until Jace gets in and the door closes. He’s very calm. His hands are behind his back, his gaze forward, his shoulders squared.

“When we find this guy,” he says, “he not coming back entirely in one piece. Understood?”

Jace squares up, folds his hands in front of his body. “Understood.”

There’s a quiet.

“That’s it?”

“It’s your business,” Jace says. “If you say this guy’s gotta come in rough, then I’ll make it happen. Period.” He glances at Alec. “And let me know if he shouldn’t come back at all.”

Alec keeps it together for a moment.

Then, “I want to fucking kill this guy, Jace.”

“If he’s summoning greater demons, no one would question it.”

“But we _need_ to bring them in so they can corroborate Magnus’ story. Make sure this does not land on him. We cannot let this land on him.”

“We won’t.”

Alec grimaces and looks at his boots before getting his face back together. He exhales, closes his eyes. “It’s just… I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this shaken up. Not even the last time Azazel got a curse on him. Even then he just… blandished about it until I got him to talk. He’s never…” Alec opens his eyes, staring down again. “I don’t know. He’s never been this messed up right off the bat.”

“Alec, it’ll be fine. You’ll get through and Magnus has been around for centuries. This isn’t what takes him out.”

“I know I just…” Alec relaxes his hands. “I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“We all wish bad shit didn’t happen to us,” Jace says flatly. “Doesn’t help. Let’s focus on what we can do.”

Alec glances at his parabatai, picking up on… something in how he says that. A ripple of some vague nauseous anger, a now familiar undertow in the composition of Jace’s moods. That restless prowling presence that always signals Jace in his mind, bristling now at the edges, ragged in a way that he can’t quite identify. Jace looks tired. He always looks _tired_ these days.

“Jace…”

“Don’t. We’re worrying about Magnus right now.”

“I’m head of the New York Institute. It’s my job to worry about more than one thing.

“Well, don’t.” The elevator opens. “Just focus on this.”

Two shadowhunters, Jetty and Xiao, approach immediately as Alec exits the lift. “Isabelle and Fray were interviewing witnesses with Santiago. They’re following up another lead. Will report in when they have more.” Jetty hands him a tablet. “And the High Warlock’s on the phone for you.”

“Fucking swell,” says Alec, before he can stop himself.

Xiao gives him a look, mostly amused, but a little exasperated.

Alec clears his throat. “Put it up on console and I’ll take it.”

Lorenzo Rey is frowning from the video panel when he gets to the center console again. He is as Alec recollects him: somewhat older in appearance, long hair drawn back from his face, handsome, dressed immaculately. Alec knows intellectually that Rey is younger than Magnus, much younger apparently, which begs the question: Do warlocks choose their apparent age? When does a warlock stop aging? Thirty? Thirty-five? Did Magnus just have a young face when he stopped being afflicted by time or is Lorenzo presenting an older face for aesthetic purposes?

Alec knows he’s avoiding the real issues.

As the man sees him and begins to speak, Alec immediately regrets not taking this to a conference room.

“Mr. Lightwood. Thank you for your prompt action in alerting me to the situation. Clave cooperation is much appreciated.”

Alec feels the ‘however’ before it comes.

“However.”

Fuck.

“I am concerned about the news I’ve heard so far: that a summoning circle was found in the residence of Magnus Bane and there is no evidence as of yet that the demon Azazel has been contained.”

“Our teams are looking into the containment issue,” Alec says, steadfast in his calm. “As for the summoning circle, it was located in the apartment below and we surmise it was set as a trap since the residents, friends of Magnus, were murdered in the execution of the ritual.” He lets that hang for just a moment before adding, “The building is quarantined, and we have other warlocks on call to examine the site. We plan to have documentation out shortly detailing the magic that may be used as defense against the –”

“Yes, the spell that _magically_ – pardon my phrasing – allowed Magnus Bane to avoid certain death at the hands of a greater demon. I am very interested in seeing this work.”

“Well,” Alec says, evenly as he can, “it was a matter of public record with other warlock council. So, it will be available in its entirety very shortly.”

“You understand, of course, how this appears to members of my community.” When Alec does not immediately respond Lorenzo says, “there is some discussion of whether or not Magnus accidentally summoned the very demon he meant to protect against in his construction of this spell. Considering the recent events with the ley-line corruption, we have concerns. Breaches of this nature are taken very seriously.”

“Yes,” Alec says calmly. “They are. And we have our experts looking into –”

“I am volunteering the assistance to examine the site.”

A line of muscle jumps in Alec’s jaw. “Then I thank you for your aid.”

“The Clave has enjoyed a great deal of support from the warlock community under the previous High Warlock, it seems only fair to continue this tradition.” Lorenzo’s smile is somewhat thin. “Even if the subject of investigation is that very warlock.”

 _Fucking swell,_ Alec thinks.

“Great,” Alec says aloud. “I’ll let the away team know who you’re sending.”

“I’ll be handling this personally,” says Lorenzo.

Alec maintains a personable smile. “Then I’ll see you there.” He hangs up and yells, “Portal! _Now_. I’m heading to the site.”

Xiao, standing nearby, says, “Your face when you’re pretending to like someone is completely terrifying, you know that, boss?”

“Ugh,” Alec says and heads for the equipment bay. “Call me if the away teams get any demonic signature.”

Jace shakes his head and tails Alec. “Where was this Lorenzo guy during the ley line problem, again?”

“Blaming Magnus, so at least he’s consistent.”

“Why’s this guy got such a hard on for sabotaging our team warlock?”

“No idea. We didn’t really get into it.” He turns to look at Jace over his shoulder. “Hey, Magnus isn’t ‘our’ warlock and thinking like that is probably part of why he’s not High Warlock anymore, so let’s try to be a little diplomatic here. I don’t want to make things worse for Magnus than they already are.”

Jace grimaces but nods. “Got it.”

“Go find Clary and Isabelle. Help them follow up on that lead. I’ll keep Lorenzo from drawing any actionable conclusions.”

“Actionable?” Jace repeats.

Alec is already on his phone. “Never mind. I’ll deal with it. Go.” He puts the phone to his ear. “Hey. Magnus. Sorry. I think we need to move faster than I first thought…”

 

* * *

 

Magnus would be a lot less nervous about all this if Catarina wasn’t giving him a look. It’s a knowing look. A ‘ _Magnus I’m looking straight through your bullshit with a laser-like focus’_ look and it makes him feel… raw. Like he’s split open along a seam with a wound hung open in front of her and she’s thinking about reaching, ever so gently, into that bleeding gap. Looking to extract the shrapnel riveted through his ribs. It’s a look that’s simultaneously surgical and soft.

It makes him want to slam his face into a wall, honestly.

“Thank you for doing this,” Magnus says.

“I’d never leave you to Lorenzo’s kindly care,” says Catarina, ever so mild.

“The Institute can only ever benefit from calling on you.”

“Flatterer. But I know I’m only here because I’m the only sucker willing to portal out here so fast.”

Magnus, genuinely hurt, insists, “That’s not true at all. I wouldn’t trust anyone else with this.”

“What about Lila?”

“Well…”

“Or Finnius?”

“Okay.”

“Breecher?”

“I get it. I have friends, but I still called you first.”

Catarina is smirking at him.

She’s crouched in the middle of his foyer, her palms pressed to the shredded floor, a shimmer of magic like a mirage across the hardwood. There are scorch marks in the old oak. There are hundreds of holes like fists in his walls where numerous embedded defense charms went nuclear. It looks, to any layman, like a warzone. To Catarina though – the walls shiver still with residual kinetic and psychic echoes. Like a tuning fork struck, there is an ugly chord humming in his home.

And Catarina has an... ear for this kind of thing.

“It’s going to be hell resetting all my residential defenses,” Magnus says, a little restless.

Catarina’s eyes are luminously bright in the fine dark of her face. “Given what you were up against, you made the right call activating them.”

“Maybe if I’d done a better job, he wouldn’t have gotten in at all.”

“You know better.” Catarina rotates her wrists and her magic ripples, flickering with motion, like seeing a reflection. She says, “There is no magical defense against intrusion by a greater demon when it’s masking its true form. Not even _you’ve_ solved for that one, rockstar.”

Magnus shrugs.

A fact: Catarina is actually a lot stronger than Magnus. Technically.  

Not everyone realizes this, even among their kind. In terms of raw magical bandwidth, she can handle more than he can. Her stamina is boundless. She can pour vitality into a victim so deep the jaws of death, it would seem impossible to pull them out. Magnus would vomit blood miles before mending some of the souls she’s coaxed back from the brink. Healing is so much more _difficult_ than the instinctive fire and razor wire that comprises his own magic. Magnus is leagues _deadlier_ than Catarina, leagues more cunning and diverse in his arsenal of spellwork… but not, technically, stronger.

He envies her, really, her confidence in devoting power to something other than self-preservation.

“See anything?” he asks.

“Just impressions. This kind of spell is mostly emotive.” She’s looking at him again. “But I _am_ picking up on some stuff…”

Magnus feels his guts lurch, his heart jump.

“Not here.” He glances toward the hall where he can hear Alec on his phone.

“Baby, we need to talk about this,” Catarina says, sotto voce. She’s using endearments. That’s bad. “If you can’t talk to me. Talk to _someone_.”

“I’m fine,” Magnus says quickly.

Her eyes soften. “Magnus…”

“My dear Catarina, this is hardly the toughest fight I’ve been in,” he says, turning up the charm, “nor the worst I’ve come out at the end. I’m fine.”

“That’s some bullshit,” she says.

“Harsh.”

“Oh,” Catarina says, frightened suddenly. “Wait. _Don’t look_ –”

Somethings ripples in her enchantment and, drawn by the motion, Magnus looks down into her scrying pool…

And there, he sees himself, or rather, himself from seven hours ago, being thrown against the wall. In the present, Magnus’ entire body locks up. Transfixed. Horrified. It’s like seeing the events but from beneath, like he’s seeing it in a puddle. He sees his former self get shoved up the wall – _wait, did that happen? He doesn’t remember leaving the ground like that_ – and being pinned by his arms. His past self is visibly screaming. He tries instinctively to throw a knee. It’s awkward. Too late. His thigh rebounds off the demon’s hip and then he’s slammed against the wall.

Once.

Twice.

The air around him ignites like he’s doused in gasoline. Blue flames coat his body right until the moment Azazel douses it. Swallowing the words in Magnus throat, licking into his mouth, crushing him and – god, he’d forgotten it happened like that. He’d _forgotten_ –

“Magnus.”

Catarina’s hands are on his shoulders.

He realizes he’s kneeling. His kneecap stings like he fell involuntarily. He’s gripping the omamori charm at his neck, fingernails digging into the little amulet. He’s dry mouthed. He’s shaking. Fuck.

“Okay. It’s okay,” Catarina is saying. Her spell is broken. Dispersed. His floor is just wood again. “It picked up on your emotions and clarified. I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It looks worse than it was,” Magnus rasps.

“Of course,” she says, not an ounce of believing him in her words.

“Don’t show that to Alec,” he says suddenly, frantically.

Catarina is like water. Like a mirror. Refracting his emotions through the strange, gentle prism of her eyes. She touches his face with slender fingers, so gingerly, and a spark of blue diffuses across his skin like an injection of mild morphine. He has to bite back an involuntary noise of relief. He hadn’t realized his head was pounding until the moment she smoothed it away. In the wake of her magic – so different from his, so much deeper and cooler, and fathoms kinder – Magnus feels simultaneously healed and utterly fucking _wounded_.

“I would never,” she whispers. “But Magnus, baby, this shit will not work.”

“I know. I’ll handle it. Just not yet.”

“Is this because of the ley line thing? Did you piss something off?”

“I don’t know, Catarina. It’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Okay. Okay.” She’s gripping his shoulder, her other hand rubbing circles into his back. Like he’s a child, but the relief from it is so overwhelming he can’t find any of his anger to cast at her. “Stand up for me. They’re gonna be in here soon. You’ve got this.” 

She stands up. She definitely draws him to his feet, but once he’s there… the world levels back out. Catarina lets go of his hands.

Alec enters the foyer with Lorenzo Rey following close behind.

“Catarina,” says Lorenzo. His gaze ticks left. “Magnus. I didn’t think you would be here, given you are the subject of this investigation.”

“Catarina requested he be here,” Alec says, cutting in before Magnus can start, very imminently, swearing. He shoots Magnus a _shut-the-fuck-up_ look. He’s using his best ‘Head of the Institute’ voice. He nods to Catarina. “Miss Loss here was on-call as our forensic incant expert. Her enchantments are improved by the presence of a physical witness.”

Catarina inclines her head. “Correct, Mr. Lightwood.”

“Thank you for coming in, Catarina. Can you tell us anything?

“Magnus was definitely attacked,” she says, mild as milk, utterly professional. “I examined the summoning circle myself. It was constructed in the hours just before Magnus’ return home and bears the residual energy of a much… less accomplished caster. The circle itself is sloppy. Of a poor design. Strategically placed. They needed proximity, to literally be directly under their target. A better warlock would have made their compact from elsewhere.”

“You’re saying an amateur warlock summoned a greater demon?” Alec clarifies.

“Essentially. Or they want to appear that way.”

“Indeed,” says Lorenzo, looking directly at Magnus.

 _Oh fuck off,_ Magnus thinks, too exhausted have clearer or cleverer thoughts. His insides feel like a scraped rind, carved for all useful flesh. He’s starving and magic-short but the thought of eating makes his stomach churn so he just stands here, in the ruins of his own apartment, while others rifle through the aftermath. He’s trying, still, to determine what he could have done differently to prevent this but the fact it’s not coming to him only racks him more tightly.

“Did Miss Catarina avail you of her medical services?” asks Lorenzo, penetrating the fog of exhaustion.

“What?” Magnus snaps.

“Did Catarina heal you?” Lorenzo asks him with feigned patience. “You fought with a greater demon. My estimate would have been that you barely survived your wounds from such an encounter and yet here you stand.”

Magnus snaps his fingers and a notebook drops into his hands. He shoves this at Lorenzo. “That’s the design for my anti-evil ward.” His head his pounding again. “It protected me from physical assault. The rest was just… holding off his other attacks. To be fair, Azazel isn’t vindictive so much as bored.”

Lorenzo seems unfazed by his statement, though he takes the notebook and rifles through it with interest. “Such is your rapport with the greater princes of hell that they find it amusing to test your limits and not follow through?” He arches a brow at Magnus. “How lucky for you.”

Magnus stares. “ _Lucky_?”

Catarina grabs his arm. It’s not visible, but there is magic in her palm and fingers, icy cold bleeding through his jacket to skin. She arrests the circulation of magic to his arm like cutting off blood to a limb and Magnus, momentarily, is appalled at her brazenness, the _familiarity_ … until he realizes just how close he’d come to manifesting an attack aura. An attack aura at the current High Warlock of Brooklyn.

He’s extremely sober then.

Lorenzo is watching him.

Alec is staring.

 _God_.

Magnus folds his arms and… gestures a little with one hand. Conversational. “Yes, I suppose it was,” he says, not even trying to manage a smile.

“What ‘other attacks’?” Lorenzo asks.

“Excuse me?”

“You said the demon continued to attack you even when barred by your ward.” He shrugs. “What else did he try?”

“To crush me for one,” Magnus enunciates, carefully not looking at Alec. “Then suffocate me. At several points he tried to induce a stroke or aneurism – the usual kind of tactics, Lorenzo. I don’t know what you’re expecting me to say.”

Lorenzo seems… well, his bearing actually softens just a little. Or rather, he seems aware, suddenly, of Catarina. Standing at Magnus’ back and the cold front rolling off her skin. Sharp as a scalpel in the hand of a discerning doctor, a razor blade set against skin, that’s how she’s looking at the man.

“I’ve already covered this,” Catarina says patiently. “The details of the actual attack are irrelevant to the matter at hand. Namely, the method of summoning and the identity of the summoner. Let’s keep focused, boys.”

“Of course,” Lorenzo says.

The cold front alleviates. “Excellent,” she says, smiling ever so calm. “Lorenzo. Can you be a dear and help me with the arrangement of a secondary scry downstairs? It will go much faster with the two of us working together.”

“I’d be delighted,” says Lorenzo, somewhat reluctantly.

Catarina sweeps the man out the door and down the stairs to the apartment below, which leaves Magnus alone with Alec. Not usually a situation he would dread, but just now, he gives some serious thought to climbing out the window… which goes to show how low his magic reserve really is. Teleporting to Bali would be his first choice in any other situation.

“Magnus, are you okay?” Alec asks.

Alexander Lightwood looks like he shouldn’t be in this room. Magnus’ apartment has always been kind of… dramatic. Alec is everything but. He doesn’t appear to have styled his hair and he’s wearing a kind of altered motorcycle jacket and jeans. There are thin lightly warded armor plates built into the lining, the sort of jacket that field agents wear. Because he’s out here doing field work and not admin work like the Head of an Institute should be. There’s a buzz of magic just under the surface of his skin – the sign of an active stamina rune because it’s three in the morning.

Because of him.

“I’m fine,” Magnus says, waving a hand. “Just tired.”

“I think we have the Lorenzo thing under control.” Alec gestures toward the bedroom. “Do you want to go lie down?”

Magnus’s entire spine goes taut, every individual vertebra slamming into the next somehow. He smiles though, a reflex in the face of panic. “No. I’m too wound up I think. I’d rather work through this.”

“You went straight to sleep back at the Institute,” Alec points out.

“Well, I’m up now.”

Alec doesn’t say anything, just studies him with that dark, focused thoroughness that makes Magnus’ entire face feel hot, like he’s being dismantled to his component parts by the most careful touch possible. Then reassembled with the same attention to detail. Like there are fingerprints all over his body. The thought sends a ripple of tension down his forearms, fine hairs rising with a shiver of gooseflesh. And it’s then that Alec moves forward and gently takes the collar of Magnus’ jacket in one hand. He tugs gently, just enough to indicate he might want Magnus closer.

“Hey,” he says.

And Magnus feels some piece of himself fracture instantly along an agonizing fault line.

Alec sees it. The warm, friendly arrangement in his features dissolves instantly into concern.

“Magnus?” And when Magnus can’t seem to get any words out, he goes, “Hey. Hey! Whoa. Okay, just…” Alec takes his elbows, his wide hands cupping his limbs with a surefooted deliberation. “Here. Let’s sit down okay?”

He draws Magnus into the living room where they take a seat on the sofa. Alec crowds near, his knees pressed into Magnus’. He cups one giant hand to side of Magnus’ neck, the rough pad of his thumb pushing along his jaw.

“Do you need to get out of here? It was a mistake asking you back here so fast. Right?”

Magnus shakes his head. “No. We had to. It’s fine.”

“You’re not fine.”

Magnus wants to insist, no, he is completely fine, but under the weight of Alec’s stare he doesn’t have the strength. He exhales shakily and Alec immediately slides his palms down Magnus’ biceps then back up to his shoulders, then his neck, carefully cupping Magnus’ head in his hands. He can’t remember being this weak in front of Alec before. Emotional, sure. But physically shaking? Gutted for magic and split open inside? What he feels is close to panic under Alec’s comprehensive gaze.

“I’m sorry,” he says, because he’s stupid.

Alec looks stricken. “What? Why?”

Magnus knots his hands against the top of his thighs. “I said before… that I lost the fight,” he whispers. He keeps his gaze down because he can’t stand to see Alec’s face.

“Magnus.” Alec ducks his head to press his forehead briefly to Magnus’s brow, nudging him like a worried cat. “You’re not making sense. Why are you apologizing? Talk to me. Look at me.”

His eyes are stinging. It’s appalling.

His hands are shaking in his lap.

“Christ,” Magnus whispers, wiping at his eyes, certain he’s smearing kohl dust and gold across his temple but too tired to care. “Lorenzo is gonna come back in here and…”

“Fuck that guy. Forget him. Talk to _me_.”

Magnus’ nails bite into his palms. “I didn’t fight him off,” Magnus rasps.

Alec shakes his head. “What do you mean?”

“I – I used every bit of magic I had to just stop him from splitting my skull. I couldn’t stop him from doing anything – anything else. Fuck.” He ducks his head, dragging a hand across his face again. Alec is gripping his shoulders. “He couldn’t hurt me. So he just… he went the other way entirely.” Magnus literally cannot look at Alec. “I couldn’t stop it, Alexander.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“No. Of course not okay, but you’re here now. Alright? You’re with me.” His fingers are digging into Magnus’ shoulders, almost painful. “You’re not there anymore. The only thing that matters to me is that you’re here.”

“No. You’re not understanding me. I didn’t –”

“Magnus.” Alec touches his chin and he looks up, meets his eyes. And it’s terrible. Because Alec is looking at him with complete gut-wrenching _comprehension_. “I know what you’re saying,” he murmurs. “And it’s still okay.”

For a moment Magnus can’t find his next sentence. When he does, it’s razor wire in his mouth.

“He fucking held me down,” Magnus grits. “In our bed, Alec. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t… do anything. I had to focus on my ward and he just… _god_. What is the point? What is the _point_ of all this?” He gestures vaguely to his apartment, to himself, to… everything. “What’s the point if I can’t stop something as fundamental as this? What the _fuck_ have I been doing for the last five centuries? I can’t –!”

Alec grabs him and pulls him into a hug, crushing him against his chest and holding him there.

“Stop,” Magnus snarls, trying to shove Alec away.

Alec doesn’t let go, just hugs him tighter.

“Did you not hear me? He _got_ me, Alec.” His eyes are burning, his throat is burning. “He didn’t leave a fucking mark but he got me.”

“I don’t care,” Alec says.

Magnus’ own breath is racking him. “How do you not _care_?”

“I care that you’re _hurt_ , Magnus. I don’t care about anything else.”

“It didn’t hurt,” Magnus snaps, lashing out now. “He didn’t hurt me. Don’t you get it? That’s the point –”

Magnus can’t get away from Alec, from how his jacket is too rough, from the smell of his skin, the heat of his neck, the pressure of his arms. He’s trapped by how good it feels. How fucking _desperately_ he wants and needs to somehow climb inside Alec Lightwood’s ribcage and just… lay there until he stops feeling like someone flayed his goddamn skin off. He wants and hates this in equal measure because he’s not ever supposed to be the one laid low like this and he can’t –

He grabs fistfuls of Alec’s jacket, tries to push him off but not with nearly enough force to be convincing and then he’s not pushing but pulling. Grabbing the back of his jacket. Pressing his face into the rough cordura fabric until it hurts, until Alec’s cradling his head and he feels the horror being _wrenched_ out of him in fistfuls of words at time.

“I couldn’t do anything, Alec.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ve never been overpowered like that.”

Alec presses his face into Magnus’ hair, murmuring over and over, “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

And Magnus whispers, “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t… I just laid there until it was over.” His fingers are fisted so tight in Alec’s jacket that his bones ache. His face is hot, his eyes blurred and overrunning into Alec’s shoulder. “It’s been…. fuck, it’s been centuries.” And because the pull of self-destruction is too strong in the throes of agony, he says, “Any other time someone wanted to _fuck_ me against my will, they had to really work for it.”

He feels Alec tense, then pull him tighter and the swell of affection and anguish that sets off in him makes Magnus want rip open a portal to the end of the fucking world and jump through it. But he doesn’t. (He can’t.) So he just pulls tighter against Alec’s shoulder, like it’s possible to get any closer than they are. Like if he tries hard enough they’ll stop being two people for a second and maybe he can bleed out some this shivering ache into the heatsink of Alec’s body. A terrible, selfish impulse, but a fantasy only so he just holds on.

“Any other time,” Magnus says, “I’d have been unconscious or… No one would _dare_. Not while I was awake.”

“I’m so sorry, Magnus.” There’s a rawness in Alec’s voice. “I’m so sorry. I... I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do. What do you need? What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know,” he confesses and that’s when his voice splits. “I’m sorry, Alec. I don’t know.”

Alec presses his face against the side of Magnus’ head, his throat, his shoulder. His hands keep roving, sliding over his back, the nape of his neck, his head and his sides. Like he’s looking for an injury, like there’s an exit wound or an artery he can press shut. It’s more soothing than it should be. The futility of Alec, all of twenty and change, trying to heal an immortal from intangible wounds.

“Let’s go,” Alec whispers. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not running from my own home,” Magnus says, words muffled against Alec’s collarbone.

“Okay. Just… what do you want?”

Magnus shakes his head.

“I’ll do anything, Magnus. Just tell me what.”

Magnus lifts his head, settles his fists in the shadowhunter’s jacket collar. He sits back to look Alec in the eye. He can feel his heartbeat under his breastbone, sure as a gravity, certain as the sun.

“Don’t say that,” he says. “unless you mean it.”

Alec lifts his hands and frames Magnus’ face in them. His palms are rough, almost too hot against his skin. “I mean it,” he whispers. “Anything you want.” And when Magnus shivers physically at his words, his voices goes low and he says, “Absolutely _anything_.”

“Then I want to find the motherfucker stupid enough to _fail_ at killing me with a greater demon on their side.” Alec looks stricken by his words, but Magnus can’t care. He’s surgically removed that part of himself for now. It’s in a pocket somewhere. Like a marble. Like a ticket stub. “I want to make them _regret_ failing.”

And Alec says, “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

Magnus is on a warpath.

Alec… has never actually seen Magnus on a warpath before. Like, he theoretically knew that Magnus had it in him, but seeing it is something else entirely. Most times, when low on magic, the solution is steak and vodka and a nap. This time it’s a triple shot of some seedy, greenish oil Magnus calls ‘a really bad idea’. He downs three shot glasses of the stuff, coughs purple smoke and with watering eyes says, “God, fuck me.”

And then opens a portal with a finger snap.

“What was that stuff?” Alec asks warily, following his boyfriend’s quick strides down an alley in lower Brooklyn.

“Call it a magical espresso shot,” Magnus says.

“Did you just do warlock steroids in front of me?”

“Mind your business,” Magnus says airily, ramming a rusted door with his shoulder.

The slam-bar clanks, screeches, and gives way. Once they’re through, Alec immediately would rather not be. The interior of the building is dark, foul-smelling, industrial piping rotting in perforated drywall. Garbage and shit rots on the floors and there’s a vague effluvium of death. Like some animal is moldering in the walls nearby. It’s pitch black at the end of the hall, but Magnus seems unaffected.

Magnus also doesn’t have his glamore up. His eyes, Alec notices with some apprehension, kind of gleam animal green in the iris when he looks around. Catching the light in his skull like a real cat’s eye.

Into the darkness, he says, “This is kind of insulting.”

He holds out two hands, palms up. Blue sparks at his fingers and he grabs something in the air. Seizes nothing and makes a tearing motion. The hallway in front of them… well, it tears. There’s no other way to describe it. Like Magnus seized the literal fabric of reality and rips it open, the dark piss-smelling interior of the hallway shredding apart along a lateral seam and dissolving like a bad TV image fading into a new one. Suddenly, they’re standing in a clean residential hallway. The is a bowl of potpourri on a little wood end table. The lights are hammered steel lamps mounted on oak wall panels. There is a fluffy carpet runner.

“Son of a bitch,” Magnus mutters.

Alec hasn’t heard Magnus swear this much in a short period of time… well. Ever, honestly.

“What are we doing?” Alec asks, side-stepping his disorientation.

“Warlock tracking,” Magnus grits.

“No, Magnus. What are we doing _here_?”

“Following a hunch,” Magnus says, sweeping down the hallway. There is a flickering of blue flame at his shoulders, steaming off the top of his hair, magic guttering like flame from a glass of vodka.

“What hunch?”

Magnus comes to a door at the end of the hallway. He puts a finger on the doorknob at it rattles. He frowns and makes a twisting motion, like his finger is a key. The doorknob rattles more viciously. Magnus glares and presses his palm flat to the knob and it got red, goes molten, then liquifies down the front of the door which catches on fire. Not that Magnus seems to care. He bats the door open with a hiss of magic, sweeping the red hot metal away with a wrist flick.

He enters the room which appears to be someone’s town house. It’s modern and expensive looking. Spotless and clean. Very little of the organized chaos that identifies Magnus’ living spaces. On the coffee table, decanters of scotch shine on a mirrored tray.

Magnus looks around.

Then he lights the couch on fire.

“Uh,” Alec says.

Magnus folds his arms and taps a foot. The rug is catching fire.

“Uh, Magnus?”

Magnus picks up one of the scotch bottle, flips the little crystal stopper out and takes a drink straight from the bottle.

“OKAY THAT’S QUITE ENOUGH,” says a voice.

And a very tall man in coat tails strides out of literally thin air. He snatches at the bottle. Alec jerks forward, instinctive, to stop the attack but Magnus rather adroitly pivots away from the newcomer’s lunge. He never once stops drinking, which sends the coattail warlock into a fit of sputtering. He recovers from the failed lunges and stamps a foot… a very hooved, goat-like foot Alec realizes. The man has furry goat hooves for feet. Magnus still has his cat eyes out. Alec isn’t sure how to read the mutual baring of warlock marks, so he just waits.

“I say, Bane. Have you gone mad?”

Magnus stops drinking and wipes his mouth with on thumb, a silver signet ring glinting somehow menacingly from his finger. “Hello, Rufus. It’s been a while.” He tilts his head. “I hear you voted for Lorenzo.”

Rufus, who is a spindly bookish man half a foot taller than Alec and half as wide, huffs, “After what you did with the Seelie Queen? Can you blame me?”

“Well, considering what I did for _you_ in eighty-nine? Kinda.”

“You can’t hold that over me!”

“I’m pretty sure I can.”

“You lit my couch on fire!”

Magnus waves a hand and the couch returns to its former state. “Well, you were hiding from me.”

“You broke my front door down!”

“How else was I going to catch you before you ran off? You’ve been avoiding me for years. Now, I’m sure you’ve heard there’s been a greater demon attack which is a problem for every living being in New York, yes, but I’m specifically making it _your_ problem.” Magnus smiles. It’s positively predatory. “I need a demon’s eyeglass.”

Rufus sputters again. “You can’t just come in here and ask for that!”

Magnus takes another drink of scotch. “Well, clearly, I can. I am doing that right now.”

Rufus seethes. “You’re not High Warlock anymore, Bane. You can’t go around just… just doing as you wish, even if you do have the Clave on a leash.” Here he looks somewhat down his nose at Alec, then wags a finger at Magnus. “I refuse to give in to your… your thuggery!”

Magnus arches a brow. “My thuggery?” he repeats.

Rufus looks visibly sweaty now.

Magnus makes a little ‘hm’ sound, like he’s just been told a fun fact that he doesn’t quite believe. He takes a single slow step to Rufus’ left.  

“You… didn’t complain about my _thuggery_ when it drove the Scry Clan out of Yonkers,” says Magnus, circling the other man. He gestures with the scotch bottle, nose wrinkled in confusion. “You didn’t complain about my methods when I put down Minish Teth.” He keeps circling, passing behind Rufus who looks a little desperately at Alec, as if for help. Magnus drawls on, “You didn’t complain about me when I fixed your backlash curse or ran Sketty Hesh out of Harlem or the vorpal pook or any of the other problems I’ve managed over the decades.”

“Y-yes, well, bringing up the past is hardly going to serve you in the present,” Rufus manages.

Magnus stops so he’s standing at the other warlock’s shoulder.

“Rufus, I think you’re missing my point.”

“What point?” Rufus says, attempting to ignore Magnus who is hovering directly in his peripheral.

“I _wasn’t_ High Warlock when I did all that, little one.”

Rufus, frightened suddenly, turns his head to look at Magnus.

And he is not remotely smiling now. There is not a single emotion on Magnus’ face actually and that neutral indifference is more frightening than any other expression he might have tried. He’s so much smaller than Rufus, but Rufus cowers when he leans in and closes the distance between them. Until they seem eye to eye. Magnus tilts his head just a little. His eyes seem… less cat-like now. A cat is too familiar a word for what’s staring out of Magnus in that moment.

“Like you said, I’m not High Warlock anymore.” He shrugs, lifting the bottle again to his lips. “I don’t have to be nearly as nice anymore.”

Magnus takes a drink and Alec takes the breath he’s been holding.

“Fine,” says Rufus, subdued. “But you’d best pay me for it. I won’t let you steal what’s mine.”

“Never. What do you want for it?”

“The Cat’s Heart Ruby. You have it?”

Magnus heaves a sigh. “That’s all rumor and conjecture and –”

“Do you have it?”

Magnus makes a noise of disgust then waves a hand and a pewter chain drops into his fingers. From the chain dangles a dark red stone. He hands this to Rufus who inspects the stone closely.

“I can’t believe you actually have it,” the warlock mumbles.

“I’m a man of multifaceted talents.”

“You’re a thug and a thief and I’m old enough to tell you that, even if no one else will.”

“No one else calls me that because they’re polite and not idiots.” Magnus holds out his hand. “Glass?”

“I never understood why they made you High Warlock,” says Rufus, but with a strange lack of venom. He studies Magnus’ face, almost… clinical in his interest. “I never understood why you wanted it.”

“Because, I’m just ever so likeable,” Magnus says. “Glass, Rufus. Now.”

Rufus nods and there’s suddenly something in Magnus’ palm. A small crystal disk, amber in color, and no bigger than a silver dollar. Magnus pockets this item and banishes the scotch bottle to the coffee table again. For a moment he looks like he’s going to say something else to Rufus… but, instead, shakes his head. Then he turns and Alec follows him straight back out the front door to the alley. When he turns around, the door they came through has vanished.

Alec uncorks all his questions then. “Magnus, what is that? What’s the plan here?”

“This is demon’s eyeglass,” Magnus says, utterly calm. “It’s a kind of tracking enhancement tool. Very rare. You need glass forged in the fire of Edom and each one only works a handful of times.” Magnus palms the little disk, stroking the surface with his thumb. His nail polish is dark against the amber surface. “I can use it to find the caster of any spell enacted against me. Like magical star sixty-nine. One-hundred percent more effective than standard warlock tracking incantations.”

“Magnus.”

He must hear Alec’s tone because he looks up. “Yes?”

“Do you know what you’re going to do if we find this person?”

“Not entirely.” He breaks eyes contact, gaze casting left toward the main thoroughfare beyond the alley. “It depends on why they summoned a demon and killed my friends.”

Alec almost regrets asking so he presses on. “Who was that guy?”

“Rufus Rend,” said Magnus, gesturing. “A demonic expert. He’s the best man to deal with most kinds of Edomic influence. He and I did quite a bit of work together in the late seventeen-hundreds, but he lost his nerve for the work. And his nerve with me.”

“Wait. With you?” Alec shakes his head. “What does that mean?”  

“I…” Magnus hesitates. “I told you my parentage.”

“Yes. Asmodeus. I’m struggling to understand why warlocks would hold demonic parents against one another since literally all of you have one.” Alec folds his arms. “I’m really not following.”

“No, it’s…” Magnus sighs. “Long before I knew Asmodeus and his connection to me, my magic has always been… manifestly more demonic.” He waves a hand. “Not on a casual basis, of course, but when I’m using deeper incantations, more powerful spells, or most combat magic – that’s when people notice. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“Your magic _feels_ more demonic?”

“It’s hard to explain. But, yes, it’s a tangible difference.”

Alec is stalling. He knows he’s stalling, trying to get Magnus on an academic tangent, anything to buy time before, possibly, lighting something else on fire. “So Rufus is uncomfortable with you,” says Alec, “because your magic is kind of weird feeling?”

Magnus looks exhasperated. “It’s a little more complex than that, but essentially.”

“Okay, so Rufus is a wuss.”

“It’s not just Rufus,” Magnus says. “Lorenzo and a lot of other warlocks feel similarly. We’re all half demon, but _showing_ it is… bad form. I guess.” He inclines his head a little, expression earnest. “You have to understand, Alexander, all warlocks have a demon parent. Yes. That’s a fact, but most warlocks have no idea _who_ their demonic parent is. Demons don’t… they don’t _care_ about their half-human children. They don’t interact with us. Or pursue us. We aren’t part of their world until…”

He trails away, looking uncomfortable.

“Until what?” Alec asks, his nerves buzzing quietly.

“Until we’re old enough to be useful,” Magnus says finally. “That wasn't the case with me. I've told you; Asmodeus came for me as a child. I banished him. I got away." Magnus closes his eyes. "What I didn't tell you is he found me again in the eighteenth century. I was afraid so I broke my silence. I asked other warlocks for support and-" Magnus sighs- "they were afraid. I lost many friends during that time."

Alec stares, uncomprehending for a moment. “ _What_?”

“I didn’t know better,” Magnus explains. “I told the wrong people. Rufus was one of them. Lorenzo another.” He shrugs. "I'm wiser now."

“That’s awful, Magnus.”

“I knew my real friends after that. So, I’m better for it I suppose But, yes, anyway. This glass should allow me to –”

Alec grabs Magnus’ hand, catches his jacket with his other hand, pulling him closer. He looks surprised. Blinking bright gold eyes at him under the ugly glow of diffused city light.

“I’m never,” Alec says, “gonna be done with you.”

Magnus’s breath hitches for some reason when he says that, his eyes widening, his mouth parting… and Alec catches that tremor on his tongue. Feels Magnus go slack in his hold for a moment, letting Alec take control of the kiss until Alec – concerned he moved too quickly – starts to pull away. But then Magnus grabs his jacket collar and yanks Alec down, taking his lips again with an almost vicious desperation. His tongue is milk and metallic in Alec’s mouth. He tastes like static, which doesn’t seem possible, but he does. His teeth catch Alec’s skin and send a shock of heat to the pit of his belly.

When they break apart, finally, they’re both breathing hard.

“I love you,” Magnus whispers, voice rough in a way Alec wants to swallow. “Alexander, I love what you just said but please never say it to me again.”

Alec doesn’t understand but senses Magnus needs this so: “I swear I won’t.” He grips Magnus’ shoulders, pulling him closer, gratified by the way the warlock’s breath catches when he does it. “I’m not afraid of you,” he says softly, near enough his words almost brush Magnus’ skin. “I think you think you’re going to scare me away.”

“Alexander,” Magnus says. “That’s a deeply noble sentiment and if you weren’t stalling me, I would point out that you really should –”

Alec kisses him again, mostly for effect.

Magnus, who is all about effect, groans a little. Helplessly. And Alec knows it down to his bones, that if Magnus asks him to kill someone tonight, he’s probably going to do it. He’s going to do it for the way Magnus breathing goes unsteady and his shoulders unwind under Alec’s touch. He wonders, morbidly, how many others have stood where he’s standing thinking the same thing: _I would destroy things for this man. For his sake. I would burn this motherfucker to the ground for Magnus Bane._

“Are you going to get that?” Magnus breathes.

“Huh?”

Magnus leans back. “Your phone, Alec.”

Oh.

His pocket is buzzing. Alec steps back and answers. “Jace?”

“Where is Magnus?” Jace says through a somewhat shoddy connection. “Is he with you?”

“Yes,” Alec says, wary now. “He’s right in front of me. What’s going on?”

“There’s a been another attack. We have casualties. A mundane and a warlock. It’s the same MO. Summoning circle in the townhouse next door to hers. Luke and the forensic team have it quarantined but it’s a fuckin’ bloodbath, Alec.”

“What happened?” Magnus says quietly.

 “Jace I’m putting you on speaker,” Alec says, thumbing the screen and switching the functions.

“Magnus?” Jace says from the phone.

“I’m here.”

“Matilda Grace. You know her?”

“Yes. She… she’s a wardsmith. What’s going on?”

“Magnus, I’m sorry.”

There’s a beat. The noise of evening traffic and the bustle of the city roars on. But here, in the alley, under the shitty side street fluorescents, Alec watches the sluggish churn of disbelief rise in Magnus’ gold-gilded eyes, the horror sliding into him like a knife between to two ribs. He kind of… recoils from the phone.

“No.”

“She was gone by the time we got there. I’m really sorry.”

“Matilda was… she was almost my age,” Magnus says, which seems like an odd first thought about the deceased, but Magnus looks on the verge of tears as he says. “She can’t be gone too.”

“Magnus,” Jace says, professionally cold. “Do you know anyone who would want to hurt you both? It’s the same MO. Neighbors killed. Pentagram on an adjoining wall. We’ve run down a few leads but all of them are just… spit-ballers. Trash talking about doing shit they don’t have the juice to ever do. Who could do this?”

“It’s one of us,” Magnus says, not to Jace or even to Alec, but to the air in the ally around him. He seems disoriented, inebriated by shock. “Someone who _knows_ us.”

He’s burning with grief. Literally. Heat thrums off his skin as he stands there. Alec hesitates, then reaches out, placing a hand on his arm. It’s like touching a hot pan through an oven mitt. Alec slides his hand into the bend of Magnus’ elbow, gently.

“Magnus. You have to calm down.”

“Someone is killing my people. I don’t have to do anything,” Magnus snaps, his anger like the iris on a laser – focusing him that rage into a molecule-splitting heat. “She was seven hundred years old. She was there at the rise and fall of empires. God. Maddy, I –” He starts speaking another language, but Alec’s translation rune can’t make heads or tails of the polysynthetic stringing, almost Spanish but not quite and when he final switches back to English, he says, “That’s not even her real name. She said she’d tell me her name one day. She…”

He stops. He goes dead still in a way that’s barely human, actually, and for a terrible moment, Alec doesn’t recognize him. He’s never seen that look before, bare-faced and _raw_ in a way that Alec can’t quite grasp. Like another veneer of glamore has cracked off and beneath that is this: something composed of fire and gold and wire-fitted with fine veins of rage so old Alec _feels_ it. Like the air going out of a room.

“I know whose killing us,” Magnus says.

And he turns around and tears a portal open in the empty space behind him. It so violent, the displaced air knocks Alec staggering, knocks him to the ground, but Magnus barely notices. He’s got the demons eyeglass in his fist and its burning like a chunk of sunshine in his palm, igniting the ring of magic that bounds the portal in a flash of amber lightning,

“Shit. _Magnus_!”

He ignores Alec. He jumps through the rift and before Alec can lunge after him, the screaming entrance winks shut and there’s nothing left but the sound of traffic and the buzz of the streetlamps overhead. 

“Fuck!” Alec scrambles to his feet.

“What?” Jace’s voice on the phone is teeny. “What happened?”

“Magnus just went rogue.”

“ _What_?!”

“Call you back.”

Alec hangs up and dials Magnus. It rings. It keeps ringing. Alec knows it’s going to go voicemail, of course, and as the rings count down he thinks, what the fuck do you say to stop an eight-hundred-year-old warlock? How to you arrest an immortal in their tracks? What the fuck is he supposed to say _in a fucking voicemail_ to that screaming ancient grief he just caught a glimpse of before Magnus cut the world open and lunged through it? What –?

The phone goes to voicemail.

“Magnus.” Alec can hear the shake in his own voice, shot with adrenaline. “I want to come with you. I _love_ you. Don’t shut me out. This is not me saying you have to stop. This is not me saying I won’t love you if you don’t, but for fuck’s sake don’t go alone without telling me what’s in your head. Please, Magnus. You – you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

And he hangs up.

“C’mon,” he murmurs. He breathes out slowly. “C’mon. C’mon…”

Someone is yelling in the streets, out there in the main thoroughfare. A taxi driver is yelling and a pack of women race by the mouth of the ally, excited and glowing under the billboards and storefront neon. Alec kneels on the filthy concrete, folding his hands against his mouth, resting on elbow on his knee and he stares at that dull, mundane air in front of him. Waiting. Willing reality to split open for him and lay open a road straight to Magnus.

“C’mon, Magnus. Since when do you not listen to your magic fucking voicemail, you control freak. C’mon.”

The silence goes on. And it goes on.

“God. Please…”

And that’s when a second portal spirals open directly where Magnus last stepped through. 

“Yes!” Alec lunges up.

Portals are hard to look at straight on. There’s something in the screaming matrix of it, in the peripheral when you stare directly down the throat of a dimensional funnel, like your eyes are seeing infinite possible things but never quite actually seeing any of them and it makes the brain ache and the soul shiver. Warlocks don’t get dimension sickness, is what Magnus has told him. They just see where they want to go.

Alec isn’t sure he’ll ever understand that.

But he runs straight into the rift.

 

* * *

 

“Don’t do that to me again,” Alec says, the minute he exits the portal.

Then he notices the room he’s in – which is some variety of nice middle-class living room with fancy wall sconces – appears to have been leveled by a wrecking ball. And it’s just a little bit on fire. Magnus stands in the middle of the blast zone, illuminated by the burning foyer to his left and the flickering lights from the kitchen beyond. His hair is a mess and his jacket’s torn in a dozen places, but more pressingly, there’s blue fire coating his palms, like he dipped his hands in kerosene and lit a match.

There is a man lodged in the wall upside down.

Not lodged as in, thrown through it, but lodged as in the wall looks like it became briefly liquid, sucked the man into it, and then returned to its previous solid-state. It’s like parts of the drywall, floor accents, and wood panels have been stretched and swirled together in an impossible molecular slurry. The room stinks of battle magic, burnt carpet, and ozone.

“What… the fuck?” Alec says. “You’ve been gone thirty seconds.”

“I’m sorry,” Magnus says.

Alec isn’t sure what for just yet, so he proceeds carefully. He jerks his chin toward the man in the wall. “Is that him?”

Magnus doesn’t look, but his eyes slide aside. “Yes.”

“Is he dead?” Alec asks neutrally.

“No.” Magnus hesitates, then, “I think we should arrest him. Bring him in for questioning at the Institute.”

 _Not kill him and atomize the evidence,_ he doesn’t say.

Alec nods, slowly. “Okay. I like that. Who is he?”

“Kellan Overt. You won’t know him. He’s –”

“No. I know that name. He’s been brought in for minor incantation violations over the years.” Alec ignores the surprise on Magnus’ face in favor of circling toward the trapped warlock. “He’s small time,” Alec says, frowning. “How did he start summoning greater demons at all? You need up front power just for the summoning, then more for containment.”

“To be honest, Alec,” says Magnus. “I didn’t stop to ask him details.”

“So how to you know it was him?”

“The eyeglass brought me to him.” Magnus clenches and unclenches one hand, fingers curling in a restless way. Like there’s a spell in his bones he’d like to let loose. “And... I know him. Actually. Matilda knew him. I… it made sense once I –”

Alec points. “You’re on fire.”

Magnus blinks and inspects his hands. “Oh.” He furls and unfurls his fingers, which remain stubbornly on fire. “Hmm.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I will be.” He looks up at Alec. “It won’t hurt you, by the way. It’s safe, I assure you.”

“Kay,” Alec says, picking his way back across the ruined living room.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Magnus says. “When I ran off, I wasn’t thinking. I just knew I needed to – what are you doing?”

Alec grabs both of Magnus hands, still slick with blue flame, and presses a kiss to his fingers, just below the knuckle. Magnus makes an aborted noise of surprise. Alec can feel the warmth from the fire flickering against his face. Like the coming and going of sunshine through a moving shade. When he breathes in, he smells metal and a burning scent like crushed peppercorn. There’s blue fire on his lips when he straightens up, catches the back of Magnus’ neck, and douses that fire against his tongue.

Tastes like licking a penny, Alec thinks.

Eventually, Magnus pulls away. He looks a little dazed. There’s still a lick of flame between his teeth, burning blue along his lower lip and Alec, fascinated, uses the pad of his thumb to wipe it away. Watch the flame gutter harmlessly between his fingertips, then fade.

Magnus is looking at him like he’s never seen him properly before. “Why do you keep doing that?” he asks.

“Because,” Alec murmurs, “I’m worried you’ll think I don’t want to because crazy shit keeps happening. This seems like the fastest way to convince you otherwise.”

Magnus’ eyes are still gold. Alec can’t remember the last time he’s gotten to look at them for so long.

“Are you okay?” Alec asks softly.

And Magnus surprises him by saying, “No,” and then smiling a little, not a real smile, but a kind of painful wince. “Which is why I keep lighting things on fire. I’m sorry. This has always gotten the job done in the past so when things get rough I… go back to old habits.”

“That’s fine. But can you be a little less gangster for a minute and breathe?”

Magnus snorts. Then presses a still-burning palm against his face, bowing his head. “ _Fuck_.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’m a fucking disaster.”

“Magnus. It’s okay. I’ll handle this from here.”

“I’m sorry, Alexander.”

“I wish you’d stop apologizing,” Alec says, taking Magnus’ hand from his face and holding it gently, “because I’m going to keep telling you to knock it off instead of being comforting. It’s putting me in a tough spot, Magnus.” He watches, unsure what it means, as the fire in his hands begins to die. “You should probably just send me a bill or something. I think you did a big chunk of job for me here.”

“Well,” Magnus rasps, “they fired me from my day job. I have a lot of time on my hands.”

“I’m not gonna pay you,” Alec whispers, drawing Magnus near, “you asshole.”

“Fine, you giant bastard.”

Alec knows he should not be attracted to Magnus when he’s calling him names in a room that’s kind of on fire with a perp lodged in a wall, when Magnus is in a state of really questionable emotional volatility. But before his brain can send that common sense to the other relevant parts of his body, Alec is already pulling the warlock into a bone-crushing hug, gathering his head against his shoulder until the fire in his hands is gone completely.

“I’m calling Jace,” Alec says.

Magnus nods.

“Shadowhunter,” says a voice.

Alec looks up. In his peripheral, he sees a flicker of butane blue flame ignite again across Magnus’ shoulders, across his jacket, down his legs until all at once Magnus Bane is engulfed in fire all over again. Clear, clean, burning in halo around him but Alec ignores it. He just looks up, over Magnus head at the man in the wall.

He’s staring at Alec, wide-eyed. His gaze is… inhumanly blue. Like methane in the irises. His face is torn open, a raw fester of splinters and blood so complete he cannot tell what Kellan looked like before the horror he is now. There’s… an incredible amount of blood actually, but the Kellan Overt barely notices. He kind of twists his spine back, grotesquely, trying to look at Alec like some deformed bat. Both his elbows and arms are bent and buried at wrong angles in the material of the wall. Blood drips from his mouth as he speaks.

“Shadowhunter.”

“Shut up. You’re wounded. I’m calling my team in to get you out and then you’re going straight to Idris.”

“Don’t bother,” Kellan says. “Listen to me.”

“Stop talking,” Alec says.

“Kill him,” Kellan hisses, eyes flicking wildly at Magnus. “You have to finish it.”

Magnus is literally a pillar of arcane fire besides him, but Alec’s first instinct is pull him closer, his fingers digging into his bicep. He ignores the flame. He can feel it creeping along his clothes, his skin, warm like a spread of sunlight under his jacket.

“He’s too old,” Kellan continues, spittle and blood flying from his lips. His teeth are red and broken behind his drawn lips. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? His father is coming for him. Like Matilda’s father was coming for her. Kill him. Kill him now while he’s still human.”

“Oh, Kellan,” Magnus says softly.

“Magnus, Magnus,” Kellan whines, frantic suddenly. “You know it’s true. I was trying to spare you. Please. You need to finish it.”

“You killed Maddy.” Every word is raw in Magnus’ throat. “How could you? She was your _mentor_! She loved you! I trusted you!” Magnus starts to break away from Alec, but he catches Magnus’ arm, holding him back as Magnus starts to yell, “I introduced you! We helped you! How could you do this to us?”

“She was too old,” Kellan sobs, blood sliding from his mouth in bubbling threads. “She told me. She told me her father sought her out, Magnus. I had to. I had to.” And when Magnus just closes his eyes, he says, softly, “Asmodeus is going to drag you to hell. Oh Magnus, he’s going to drag you to the heart of Edom and gut you for your human soul.”

“You’re insane,” Magnus says. “You’re insane and I didn’t see it.”

“I’m the only sane one!” Kellan screams. “Shadowhunter, if you love him, you’ll kill him now!”

Alec moves between Magnus and the madman then, keeping one hand on Magnus’ shoulder. His own heart is in his throat, his nerves raw with adrenaline and a low creeping horror because every word out of Overt’s mouth is sincere, genuine, a terrible violence stitched together with sinews of frantic, shivering _love_. He loves Magnus. He loved Matilda. And five minutes ago, Alec had never heard of either of them. Magnus is _shaking_ with hurt and Alec has no idea who the _fuck_ these people are and that is almost the worst part.

So, Alec does the only thing he can really do – he brings things back to center. To facts and timeline and method.

“Overt,” he says, drawing the warlock’s pale, unhinged gaze. “You’re not strong enough to summon a greater demon. How did you do it?”

“Easy.” Overt smiles through the blood. “I know which lords of hell stand in opposition to their demon sires. Summoning greater demons is only difficult when they resist the bonds of the pentagram. It’s easy when they come willing to do your work. Don’t you see? We’re important to them. They know we have utility to their rivals so they’ll move to strike us down. Killing warlocks is a form of disarmament.”

“You summoned Azazel to kill me,” says Magnus, halting in disbelief, “because he’s Asmodeus’ _rival_?”

Kellan is blank-faced now. “Yes.”

“Maddy did not die easily,” Magnus breathes. “I would not have died easily. Demons don’t kill people cleanly, Kellan. How could you be okay with that, with killing us that way, in the way you _know_ we fear?”

“To save you,” Kellan says, like it’s obvious.

Magnus explodes. Literally. The flames coating his skin flares out, boiling around him as he screams now, “You don’t save me from a demon by fucking feeding me to another demon, goddammit!”

Alec pulls Magnus away. “C’mon. Let the Institute handle this.” For a moment it feels like Magnus won’t let Alec pull him away, so he ducks close, his mouth against Magnus’ whispering, urgently. “Magnus. Don’t. C’mon don’t. Let Lorenzo and Catarina and the others handle this.”

“I introduced them,” Magnus whispers.

“I’m sorry, Magnus. C’mon.” He loops an arm around Magnus’ shoulders, feels Magnus give a little under his pull. “He can’t go after anyone else. It’s over. Okay?” Relief wells in him as Magnus falls back a step at his insistence. “It’s over.”

“Kill him!” Kellan is shrieking. “Kill him, shadowhunter!”

His screams follow them beyond the front door into the street outside, to the curb where they take a seat and Magnus leans against Alec’s shoulder until back-up comes. Magnus’ hands continue to burn for hours afterward, only finally extinguishing when the warlock falls into a fitful sleep in Alec’s bed. Even then, he can’t stay asleep. Thrashing awake until Alec rolls over and physically restrains him, arms drawn around him, pinning his wrists against his chest.

Alec holds Magnus down until the panic bleeds out of him.

“I love you,” he says, even though Magnus is sleep. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

 

* * *

 

Magnus has a hangover.

Not an alcoholic hang over. He doesn’t get those because magic can sober up any consequence of a good night out, but three shots of pure vital infusion is enough to leave him _glowing_ with migraine to the point that the nausea he feels is indistinguishable from despair. Greif has always been a physical ailment in his experience. He wakes up with his _skin_ aching and wave of pins and needles crawling along the insides of his skull. He moans, pressing his fingers into his temple.

“God,” he croaks.

“Hey.” A warm hand smooths over his bare shoulder. “You okay?”

“By the Angel’s sparkling halo, no.”

“Yeah.” Alec speaks very softly, his deep voice only barely audibly. “So, the warlock crack has side-effects, huh?”

“It was not – oh god.” Magnus presses both hands over his eyes because even the dim light in Alec’s room is torturous. He shudders, gagging a little and only just barely keep from puking bile in his boyfriend’s bed. “Shit.”

Alec smooths his hair off his forehead, murmuring, “Magnus. Do you need me to get a bucket?”

“God,” Magnus says, too nauseous to feel humiliated. “Maybe.”

“Okay.” Alec starts to get up from the bed.

“Wait. Wait. Don’t. I’m okay.”

Alec lies back down, his weight sinking into the mattress beside Magnus again and he, knowing exactly the trouble, loops his arm back around Magnus’ waist and fits the curve of his body back to Magnus’ spine. His breath is warm against the back of Magnus’ head, his neck, then his shoulder. He kisses him where the slope of his neck meets his collarbone. It takes Magnus a minute to register that Alec must have undressed him last night, because he has no recollection of losing his jacket or his dress shirt. He’s still wearing his pants but missing his boots.

“What happened after… after we left Kellan’s place?”

“I think you kind of went into shock,” Alec murmurs.

“Okay. What… what did I do when that happened?”

“Nothing, Magnus. You were just kind of quiet.”

“Are you lying to make me feel better?”

Alec hugs him tighter. “No, Magnus. I dunno. You were really quiet and that stuff hit you like seven shots of whiskey. I’ve never seen you staggering drunk or… in shock before. So I dunno. Are you usually quiet when you’re that out of it?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Which is why I don’t do that. Can’t be the life of the party when you’re catatonic.”

“Good to know,” Alec says and kisses his neck again. “Magnus?”

“Yes?”

“I’m here for you, you know that, right?” There’s a long pause and Alec slides his arm up Magnus’ flank a little, so he can press the wide heat of his palm over Magnus’ heart. “Hey. Just tell me what you need. If you want me to get you breakfast or shut up or talk. Just tell me what to –”

“Is Kellan in Idris?” Magnus interrupts.

“Yes,” Alec says after a brief pause. “It took Lorenzo and Catarina all of ten minutes to definitively confirm everything I said and… Kellan kept confessing to the crime so… Yeah. He’s already in Idris.”

“Clave justice is swift,” Magnus says, more bitterly than he means to, but Alec doesn’t rise to the unintended bait. “Oh, Alec, what on earth do you think of me now?”

Alec kind of freezes a moment, then tucks his chin over Magnus’ shoulder. “I think what I’ve always thought: You’re beautiful and kind and you’ve been around a really long time so you’re gonna be a bit complicated. So nothing new.” He kind of presses his face into side of Magnus’ neck, his next words transcribed against his skin by lips and breath. “I think… I’ve never seen you lose someone though. And I’ve seen you hurt before but not like this. So, I’m worried about you.”

Magnus swallows. God, he wishes his skull wasn’t splitting right now. That it didn’t feel like someone stuck the business end of an electric mixer in his guts. He wishes he could stop thinking about his dead friends – about the brownies the Holtzman’s would bring him every Sunday and the fact they are never going to do that again. The same recipe they’ve been making him for a decade and half, the one he taught Maria Holtzman when she was still a child, the one she grew up perfecting until she married.

He wishes he could stop _obsessing_ about the last conversation he had with Matilda. During the crisis with the Seelie Queen and Valentine, when he’d called on all of the New York warlocks to seal the city in holy fire. They’d said… what? Barely a handful of sentences to one another?  She’s been wearing… a floral dress and spectacles. He’d kissed her on the cheek, said something about how it had been too long. God what had he said to her? What did he –?

“Hey,” Alec says. “You’re being way too quiet. If you don’t wanna talk, it’s fine but…”

“Three of my friends are dead,” Magnus whispers. “They’re dead by the hand of someone I considered a friend. They’re dead because he decided Matilda and I were too dangerous to live.” He draws an unsteady breath. “How is that possible? How did we survive Valentine and then do this to one another? I don’t understand it.” He feels his voice giving out but pushes through anyway. “I’ve been alive for centuries. I’ve lost… so many people over and over to all manner of violence and I _never_ understand this, Alexander.”

Alec pulls him tighter. “I don’t think you’re supposed to understand that,” Alec says.

“We kill each other for nothing,” Magnus says.

Alec has no comment on that. He just holds him.

“I can’t stand how this feels,” Magnus says, unable, suddenly to stop himself. “Every time, I can’t stand it.” He reaches up, laces his fingers through Alec’s, pressing his palm over his knuckles until the bones in his hand ache. “Ragnar. Elliot, and Matilda. All gone in less than half a year? I can’t… I haven’t lost people this fast since the Uprising. I thought peace time would last longer, Alec, I just…”

“Hey, hey,” Alec murmurs, hushing against his hair. “I know. Okay? I know.”

“I never get better at this,” Magnus gasps.

“You don’t have to, Magnus. You don’t have to get good at losing people. God. It’s okay.”

“It’s going to kill me,” he says. “One day, it’s going to kill me. I won’t be able to stand losing one more person and it’s going to kill me, Alexander.” And before he can stop himself he cries, “I think if it was you, if I lost you like that right now, it would kill –”

Alec cuts him off by coming up on his elbow so he can pull Magnus over onto his back, swing one leg over and straddle Magnus, so he’s bracing his weight on his forearms, framing his shoulders with his body completely. Curved over him so he’s trapped the shadow that Alec’s body throws over him and Magnus can’t explain the strange relief that is. How much a spell it is, a fucking incantation, when Alec leans his forehead into Magnu’s aching brow and just… holds there for a moment. Until the panic slides away through his fingers into the mattress beneath them.

“You’re not going to lose me,” Alec whispers.

“Not today,” Magnus says, and it’s like tearing the scab off a wound and bleeding fresh. “Not today but…”

“Hey. Stop.” Alec fits his hands to the side of Magnus’ head, curling his fingers into his hair and it feels so good, he has to swallow a groan, but Alec, oblivious, just goes on quietly. “It’s my job to be kind of weird about the mortality thing.” He smiles and it’s devastating. “We can’t switch roles now. And maybe if you lost me today, if I got hit by a fuckin bus or whatever, it would be the end of the world right now. But you’re not losing me today. And losing me ninety years from now is not the same as losing me right goddamn now, Magnus. C’mon.”

“I’m sorry,” Magnus starts to say.

“Stop saying that,” Alec murmurs.

Alec inhales, then exhales through his nose, slowly. His forehead is just barely pressing to Magnus’, not even a breath of pressure. Like Magnus is going to shatter under even an ounce more pressure and that should annoy him. It would annoy him any other day, the implied fragility there, but not today. Today Magnus feels like his skin is rice paper and Alec’s breath could dissolve him.

“Breathe, okay?” Alec kisses him, carefully. “Just breathe.”

Magnus obeys. Because what else can he do? Alec Lightwood helps him breathe until he remembers how to do it without him. Eventually, Alec tries to roll off of him, but when Magnus protests, humors him and kind of just lies down on top of Magnus like some kind of massive, tattoo-striped cat. He uses one hand to keep carding his fingers through his hair. He keeps his mouth near Magnus’ ear, saying, over and over, “Are you okay? Is this okay?” and “I love you. I love you so _fucking_ much.”

Magnus wakes up hours later.

Alec is already awake. Like he kept a vigil the entire time Magnus slept and the thought sends a pulse of dull affection and disbelief through his aching body. His bones feel like their built of iron, but Alec pushes his hair from his forehead and it hardly matters.

“Hey,” Alec says. His hair is a mess. His eyes are dark and studying every detail in his waking, like Magnus is a fine mechanism, a piece of clockwork the may be half a pace off its timing. “Hey, how’re you feeling?”

And Magnus says. “A little better.”

And it’s not a lie.

“Okay. Do you want to eat something?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Okay.” Alec kisses his forehead. “I’ve got you,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback and comments keep me trucking. Also, please talk to me about this fandom. I'm brand new to it and omg. This is technically my third Shadowhunters fic and by far the longest. Hope you enjoy! I def answer questions so feel free!


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